Trinida­di­an na­tion­als aboard the En­chant­ment of the Seas will be ea­ger­ly await­ing word from the Min­istry of Health on whether they will be able to dis­em­bark and go home to their fam­i­lies to­mor­row.

This af­ter it was con­firmed that one more of their com­pa­tri­ots had test­ed pos­i­tive for COVID-19 yes­ter­day, fol­low­ing test­ing on 295 of them on Thurs­day.

This brought to sev­en the num­ber of cruise ship work­ers from the ves­sel who test­ed pos­i­tive for the virus. Six work­ers test­ed pos­i­tive soon af­ter the ves­sel ar­rived with over 300 na­tion­als on June 14 and they were sent to the Cau­ra Hos­pi­tal for treat­ment. The rest of the work­ers have been quar­an­tined on the ship in the Gulf of Paria since then.

The lat­est COVID case took T&T’s tal­ly to 124 cas­es, with the ma­jor­i­ty of them be­ing im­port­ed cas­es.

One na­tion­al aboard the ship yes­ter­day told Guardian Me­dia they had not been in­formed of the lat­est pos­i­tive test. The na­tion­al, who did not want to be iden­ti­fied, said they have all been pack­ing to leave the ship to­mor­row (Sun­day), hav­ing reached the end of their quar­an­tine pe­ri­od.

How­ev­er, ac­cord­ing to the min­istry’s pro­to­col, once a mem­ber of a group in quar­an­tine tests pos­i­tive for the virus, the oth­er mem­bers of the group are sup­posed to start a fresh quar­an­tine pe­ri­od.

Told of this last evening, the crew mem­ber be­came anx­ious, say­ing they had not been giv­en any in­for­ma­tion re­gard­ing fur­ther quar­an­tine by the ship’s per­son­nel. How­ev­er, she not­ed that yes­ter­day af­ter­noon the ship’s per­son­nel an­nounced that once their PCR re­sults were neg­a­tive they would be al­lowed to dis­em­bark the ship and go home.

Mean­while, Sea­men and Wa­ter­front Work­ers’ Trade Union pres­i­dent Michael An­nisette yes­ter­day in­sist­ed that port work­ers should not be blamed for the de­lay in test­ing for the crew mem­bers on board.

Protest ac­tion by the port work­ers forced the ini­tial test­ing of the work­ers to be resched­uled from Tues­day to Thurs­day as the ves­sel could not dock at the Cruise Ship Com­plex on Tues­day.

De­spite re­ceiv­ing a let­ter from the Port Au­thor­i­ty of T&T man­age­ment yes­ter­day sug­gest­ing that work­ers have been in breach of the In­dus­tri­al Act dur­ing their on­go­ing protest ac­tion, An­nisette de­nied this is the case.

“As I speak to you, three things would have hap­pened, I re­ceived a let­ter, a threat­en­ing let­ter from the Port Au­thor­i­ty, about the union breached the in­dus­tri­al act. (That) the work­ers are tak­ing il­le­gal in­dus­tri­al ac­tion,” An­nisette said in a phone in­ter­view.

“We are avail­able for any dis­cus­sions and we haven’t done any­thing to co­erce or force the Port Au­thor­i­ty and we cat­e­gor­i­cal­ly de­ny do­ing any such things.”

He said de­spite the protest ac­tion, which has been on­go­ing for the week, the au­thor­i­ty had not ap­proached the union to con­duct any dis­cus­sion.

“We have not got an in­ti­ma­tion or in­di­ca­tion that there is a will­ing­ness to meet with the union, notwith­stand­ing the port still have sev­er­al ves­sels out­side there and would have lost rev­enue over the week,” An­nisette said.

The protest ac­tion con­duct­ed by the port work­ers al­so led to the de­lay of sail­ings along the sea bridge on Tues­day and the can­cel­la­tion of sail­ings be­tween the is­lands on Wednes­day. The protest ac­tion con­tin­ued yes­ter­day de­spite the let­ter sent to the SWW­TU.